Anchiceratops

Anchiceratops (ˌæŋkiˈsɛrətɒps ) is an extinct genus of chasmosaurine ceratopsid dinosaur that lived approximately 72 to 71 million years ago during the latter part of the Cretaceous Period in what is now Alberta, Canada. Anchiceratops was a medium-sized, heavily built, ground-dwelling, quadrupedal herbivore that could grow up to an estimated long. Its skull featured two long brow horns and a short horn on the nose. The skull frill was elongated and rectangular, its edges adorned by coarse triangular projections. About a dozen skulls of the genus have been found. The first remains of Anchiceratops were discovered along the Red Deer River in the Canadian province of Alberta in 1912 by an expedition led by Barnum Brown. The holotype, specimen AMNH 5251, is the back half of a skull, including the long frill, and two other partial skulls, specimens AMNH 5259 (the paratype) and AMNH 5273, were found at the same time, which are now stored in the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. A complete skull designated NMC 8535, was discovered by Charles M. Sternberg at Morrin in 1924, and was described as A. longirostris five years later, in 1929. but this species is widely considered a junior synonym of A. ornatus today. In total, at least ten incomplete skulls have been recovered. The skulls are different with respect to their proportions (e.g. size of the supraorbital horn cores, the dimensions of the frill) which had led researchers to conclude that the disparity is ontogenetic. The genus name Anchiceratops, means "near horned face", and is derived from the Greek words "anchi" (αγχι-) meaning "near", "keras" (κερας) meaning "horn", and "ops" (ωψ) meaning "face". Anchiceratops was described and named by American paleontologist Barnum Brown, in 1914, as he believed that this dinosaur represented a transitional form closely related to both Monoclonius and Triceratops and intermediate between them, but closest in the development of the skull frill to the latter, hence the generic name meaning "near Ceratops".